One of the most remarkable of all San Francisco watering holes was the Black Cat. It may not have had nine lives, but it had two — and they were memorable.

It was the only tavern in San Francisco to be forced out of business by moralistic authorities not once but twice, the second death taking place 42 years after the first. The Black Cat’s rollicking history traces a battle between the forces of respectability and bohemianism, commerce and vice, that’s still being fought in San Francisco today.

The Black Cat’s first life was in the most intriguing of all San Francisco’s neighborhoods, the Uptown Tenderloin. The cafe opened around 1911 in the basement of the Athens Hotel at 56 Mason St., on the corner of Eddy Street. The building, on the southeast corner, still stands — a mural on the Mason Street side depicts the first cafe to inhabit the basement, the Breakers.

The Black Cat offered cabaret-style entertainment, with revues featuring scantily clad singers and late-night dancing. In 1913, an advertisement in The Chronicle touted the joint’s “spirited corps of feminine beauty” and said it was “fast becoming the most popular entertainment and eating resort in bohemia.”

According to Tenderloin historian Peter Field, the Black Cat, the Breakers, the Mirror, and half a dozen other cafes and saloons in the neighborhood were sketchy places, frequented by gamblers, pimps, prostitutes, petty criminals and other Uptown Tenderloin regulars.

“They used them to socialize and do business,” Field said. They were also good venues “in which to trim slummers and the occasional 'good thing’ or wandering sucker.”

Local merchants, along with religious and women’s groups, sought to get rid of places like the Black Cat. To understand this long-running conflict, it’s necessary to understand something about the history of the neighborhood.

Field notes that after the 1906 earthquake and fire destroyed the Tenderloin, its businesses relocated west to lower Fillmore Street, which at that time became known as the Uptown Tenderloin. When the saloons, cafes, brothels and gambling dens were driven out of the Fillmore and returned to their original neighborhood, the name “Uptown Tenderloin” relocated with them. But neighborhood improvement groups representing what was known as “Down-town” were determined to get rid of the old vice district and replace it with a cleaned-up shopping area.

There was also a political dimension to the battle. Reform-minded Republican politicians sided with the improvement organizations against the corrupt GOP machine that had controlled City Hall for decades. Many Republican businessmen opposed the reformers because they owned Tenderloin cafes.

This fight would continue until the Great Depression.

Dance-license fights

Unable to revoke the cafes’ liquor licenses, the downtown boosters went after their dance licenses, which were handed out at the discretion of the Police Commission.

Groups like the West of Powell Street Improvement Club and the YMCA pressured the panel and succeeded in driving the Breakers out of business. Soon after, the Black Cat opened in the same space, and the reformers went after it.

The Black Cat and its Damon Runyon-esque cast of characters managed to survive for several years. But it and other other red-light businesses in the Uptown Tenderloin were dealt a heavy blow in 1917, when the federal government ordered all saloons and brothels within 5 miles of any military base in the U.S. closed down. (According to Curt Gentry’s “The Madams of San Francisco,” 25 percent of American servicemen were unfit for duty in World War I because of alcoholism and venereal diseases.)

Meanwhile, reform groups went to work on the Black Cat’s dance license. In November 1921, a former judge wrote a letter to the Police Commission asking it to ban racy costumes worn by female singers, which he said had “gone beyond all reasonable limits.”

“We know that certain elements, which interferes (sic) with this region in development as a business district, will infest any cafe owned by men who have heretofore permitted them to carry on unlawful vocations,” intoned the judge.

(The Chronicle was apparently unimpressed by the judge’s argument. With deadpan mockery, its story opened, “George F. Crothers, formerly of the Superior Court bench here, is of the opinion that some San Francisco cafe entertainers do not wear proper clothing.”)

Bohemian atmosphere

Defenders of San Francisco’s freewheeling past fought back. Two noted literary figures, Peter Clark Macfarlane and Will Irwin, urged the Police Commission to grant the cafe its dance license, “hoping that San Francisco’s famous bohemian atmosphere will be perpetuated.”

But the commission sided with the forces of respectability and rejected the license, saying it wanted Mason and Taylor streets to be exclusively a shopping district. In 1921, the Black Cat shut its doors.

Mason and Taylor never did become a shopping district. In the 1930s, the basement of the Athens Hotel was home to a probably gay bar called the Kit Kat Club. For years, a raunchy strip club called the Chez Paree stood on Mason, a block from the site of the defunct Black Cat.

But the Black Cat had not used up all its lives. At the end of Prohibition, it reopened across town, on the edge of North Beach. And this version of the Black Cat, whose story we will tell next week, would become perhaps the most legendary of all San Francisco’s 20th century bars.

Answer: The shallowest part of the sand bar outside the Golden Gate, so called because boats carrying potatoes from Bolinas ranches sometimes lost their loads there.

This week’s trivia question: Will the statue of Madison Bumgarner outside AT&T Park be larger than the Colossus of Rhodes?

Editor’s note

Every corner in San Francisco has an astonishing story to tell. Every Saturday, Gary Kamiya’s Portals of the Past will tell one of those lost stories, using a specific location to illuminate San Francisco’s extraordinary history — from the days when giant mammoths wandered through what is now North Beach, to the Gold Rush delirium, the dot-com madness and beyond.